Commercialism always had a place at the movies, sure, but it really exploded in the go-go 1980s when product placement became the marketing scheme du jour. Charlie Jane Anders’s piece for Gizmodo in 2015 neatly outlined the assault of 80s-ish product placement in sci-fi, citing the Reese’s Pieces of “E.T.” and the omnipresent Pepsi of “Back to the Future”, two beloved, lovely movies that nevertheless put the pedal to the merchandising metal. These pieces of product placements made for good jokes, absolutely, but there is something even more striking in commercialism being rendered as comically integral to the plot, like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Of course, if you’re Christopher Walken in “At Close Range”, you simply transform a moment of product placement – “You want some Corn Flakes®?” – into sheer terror, deliberately mangling marketing in the process. Props.
No instance of product placement, however, warms my heart as much as its preeminent appearance in “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.” No, not the Michelob namedrop nor the McIntosh plug (which is a pretty good joke itself); I’m talking about Pacific Bell. I’m talking about this shot.
The first noticeable detail of this shot is the color. The sun falls, barely, down the alley off to the left, mixing impeccably with the faded yellow of the Pacific Bell ad, emitting a washed out feel that actually come across kinda guerilla, like director Leonard Nimoy was crouched between two parked cars across the street getting the shot on the fly without a permit. Of course, that’s a sentiment dripping in irony given that the moment is, as established, product placement. And the product placement might, in one way, be viewed as even more egregious than your usual product placement even if it is simultaneously crucial to the narrative. But then, it is that narrative relevance granting it weight.
The moment is born of McCoy, Scotty and Sulu in present day San Francisco (time travel!) on the prowl for some sort of twentieth century equivalent of transparent aluminum. But where oh where will they find it?! And as they wonder, this advertisement appears before them. In a way, it’s a precursor to the “Google” narrative trick, in which a character who needs to know anything can simply “Google” it, which is often dismissed, not wrongly, as storytelling laziness. You could call the Pacific Bell shot in "Star Trek IV" storytelling laziness. But while it is, through a modern lens, something like a throwback to a time when you could not just “Google” something, when you actually had to find a phonebook and then, ye gods, go through it, this shot is nevertheless a caustic shot across the bow. It is mystical product placement in which consumerism becomes the answer to their prayers. What’s more 80s than that?
I am not a Trekkie, I am not a sci-fi guy at all, and yet, long before I became a cinephile scanning the Turner Classic Movies menu daily, sci-fi was helping me form motion picture taste. Like “Star Wars” instilled in me upon further review a love of Warner Bros.-ish 1930s B movies, “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” instilled in me upon further review a love of screwball comedies. That’s what the movie is, or, more accurately, that’s what the movie becomes, after an opening act we will discuss momentarily, when an enormous space probe threatens 23rd century Earth by evaporating its oceans and enclosing the planet in darkness by blocking the sun all in a futile attempt to re-open communication with humpback whales that have, alas, long ago gone extinct. With the present sans humpback whales, the only way to find a few is for the crew of the Starship Enterprise to go back in time, to the late 20th century, 1986 to be exact, necessarily coinciding with the release date, which becomes as much a portal from spacey seriousness to earthbound comedy, underlined by the conversation in which the complications and absurdity of time travel are joyously breached with a casual kinda hey, why not, whatever.
McCoy: “You're going to try time traveling in this rust bucket?” Kirk: “We’ve done it before.”
If Spock gifted Kirk a copy of “A Tale of Two Cities” in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” then he might have opened the fourth film by gifting his old friend a copy of The Howard Hawks Collection, given how “The Voyage Home’s” second act, in which our principal gang becomes fish out of water in 80s San Francisco, is rendered with an immaculate blend of knowing, self-effacing and vintage hammy comedy. The film was directed by Leonard Nimoy and he graciously divvies up comic moments to most everyone, even if he saves the majority of them, as is necessary, for Kirk and Spock. So comfortable in one another’s presence on screen, Shatner’s inherent pompousness is nimbly employed as Kirk becomes a self-appointed know-nothing tour guide of a strange world while Nimoy plays the bumfuzzled straight man to the hilarious hilt. Why they even skillfully make room, briefly, for a third member of their comic team in the person of Catherine Hicks, who plays the semi-love interest of Kirk, a heroic marine biologist who leads the two time-travelers to the needed whales, and whose incredulousness at Kirk and Spock is sidesplitting, evinced most ably in the stellar sequence in the front seat of Gillian’s truck where she humors these “the hard luck cases” and Nimoy the director simply allows the byplay, behavior and reaction shots to do all the heavy lifting.
“Star Trek IV” took its crew back to the present day, of course, because it would be humorous for audiences to see the crew of the Starship Enterprise in a modern context, communicating in a language where swearing is not only commonplace but imperative, compelled to lean on Reaganomics rather than Trekonomics. The film, however, was just as driven by one of our more noble isms. 1986 was still very much in the midst of Morning in America™, which meant consumerism superseded environmentalism, and the makers of “Star Trek IV” had seen enough. Tying the 23rd century’s potential doom explicitly back to the 20th, where mankind, as the film’s dialogue tell us, had hunted the humpback whales to extinction, was an eco-friendly invocation to its audience. And as funny as the rest of the movie might be, Nimoy treats this plotline with impressive earnestness, delivering laughs and thoughtfulness in equal measure, transforming entertainment into a statement.
I keep thinking about “Star Trek IV”, not just because its 30 year anniversary was recently observed, but because my new American government is hell bent on teleporting us back to the 1980s, where consumerism trumps (ha!) environmentalism, as if every lesson Nimoy sought to impart in his film has been blithely dismissed. I keep thinking about how the kids of our kids of our kids will be left to fit the bill, potentially leaving them like the those in “Star Trek IV”, unknowingly at the mercy of their anti-environmentalist forefathers. I keep thinking about how future earthlings may not have the benefit of time travel or cutesy hijinks to save them.
I keep thinking about this scene in the underratedly ominous opening act of “Star Trek IV”, in which the blotting out of this blue planet for its past sins is imminent, where Sarek (Mark Lenard), Spock’s father, who is always around to be wise, enters Starfleet headquarters, to converse with President of the United Federation of the Planets (Robert Ellenstein). I keep thinking about how Nimoy sets the shot with Sarek and the President in front of this window being pounded by rain, shrouded in gray darkness, underlining how there is no way out, fatalistically trying to reason with a probe whose language to their ears is gibberish. I keep thinking of the melancholy in their movements and the pessismism in their voices. I keep thinking about Sarek’s faint plea to the Federation President. I cannot, try as I might, prevent that plea from echoing in my mind.
“Perhaps you should transmit a planetary distress signal...while we still have time.”
Shout-Out to the Extra is a sporadic series in which Cinema Romantico shouts out the extras, the background actors, the bit part players, the almost out of your sight line performers who expertly round out our movies with epic blink & you’ll miss it care.
Maybe you missed the moment. In the aftermath of his team’s upset to those uppity ups from New Haven, Baylor’s Taurean Prince was asked by a reporter how his team got out-rebounded by Yale. Prince answered by explicating precisely what a rebound was and then observing that Yale got more of those than his team did. Mic drop. It was, as both Slate’s Josh Levin and director/screenwriter/producer Jerry Zucker noted, a version of the ambiguous syntax that so many of Zucker’s films, like the majestic “Airplane!”, used to such grand effect. Now I don’t think that Prince necessarily thought about that when he said the line. I’m sure he was peeved post-loss and peeved about a dumb question and felt like indulging his inner-Popovich. But sometimes a person can be a gifted comic without really even knowing it.
Maybe you know the story, maybe you don’t. It was first recounted on StarTrek.com 11 years ago and has been cited many times since, particularly as we inch ever closer to the latest “Star Trek” film. It concerns Layla Sarakalo, a San Francisco resident in the mid-80s, who learned one unfortunate morning that her car had been towed because a movie was being filmed on her block and she had missed the signs threatening to haul her and other neighborhood cars away if they were not moved to make way for the director’s chair and other moviemaking accoutrement. Not having the necessary money to get her car back. Ms. Sarakalo hit on the idea of scoring some quick cash to save her vehicle by working for the movie being filmed on her block as an extra. That film was “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.”
Maybe you know the scene in “The Voyage Home.” The crew of the Enterprise, who are, by necessity, aboard a cloaked Klingon vessel, have traveled back in time, to 1986 San Francisco, for reasons of requisite Earth-saving. You know how they do. But their ship has been drained of power and to acquire the necessary power to travel forward in time they plot to reel it in from a nuclear powered submarine. Chekov and Uhura are dispatched to find the submarine. They can’t, which leads to the classic scene of Chekhov, a Russian, at the tail-end of the Cold War asking passerby the location of the nuclear vessels while an incredulous, stone-faced cop looks on. No one is willing to help…save for one woman.
That woman was played by Ms. Sarakalo. She was not, it seems, meant to say a line. She was just an extra. She was supposed to behave like all the other extras and look at this crazy Ruskie with bug eyes and keep walking. Sarakalo did not. Told to “act naturally”, that’s precisely what she did. (Watch below. Sarakalo enters at the 38 second mark.)
Sarakalo plays this moment wonderfully, brilliantly. She plays it like a local who’s just been asked by a tourist for the location of some off the beaten path boutique hotel. She sort of scratches her head that way you do when you’re suddenly put on the thinking spot, and then she answers by not only echoing exactly what Chekov has just said, but by putting the perfect pregnant pause between “I think it’s across the bay” and “In Alameda.” It’s like she momentarily morphed into Jack Benny. And when you consider that she wasn’t even supposed to have a line, and that she just spoke off the cuff, it becomes that much more incredible, innately leaving a space for the non-existent rimshot, displaying a seemingly natural comedic timing that fit right into the wholly comedic motion picture.
Because she spoke, and because anyone who has a line in a movie is required to be registered for the Screen Actors Guild, the producers quickly enrolled Sarakalo in SAG rather than simply cut her line. Well of course they did! You can’t cut comic gold! She was never seen again, apparently moving on to run a Paris fashion house, and good for her. Yet I wonder if the motion pictures missed out. I see many a purportedly funny movie these days with professionals that consistently fail to be anywhere near as funny as Sarakalo, just trying to get her car back, was in a handful of seconds.
We need to talk about Spock, of course, but before we talk about Spock, we need to talk about "Going Down To Liverpool." That was a song by Katrina and The Waves but The (immortal?) Bangles covered it in 1984, and for the song’s video on MTV they chose to film it as limo ride – The Bangles in the back, singing, with a seemingly irritated, my-time-is-too-valuable-for-this-horseshit chauffeur. The chauffeur was played by Leonard Nimoy. Why him? The trivia masters will tell you it’s because Susanna Hoffs was friendly with Nimoy’s son, Adam, but over-analyzers know better. It takes a lot to play annoyed in the presence of Susanna Hoffs, one of the 80’s grandest divas, and who had more experience playing irritated compatriot to a diva than Leonard Nimoy?
It’s one of those never-ending eerie cosmic coincidences that the venerable Interwebs domain Grantland ran a "Second Banana" Tournament the exact same week the man who played Spock passed away (Friday, aged 83) but that’s exactly what happened. Spock advanced all the way to the Final Four, the semi-finals, before being dispatched by Canada. Grantland’s resident Trekkie was enraged by this development, and how can you blame him? It robbed us of a Spock vs. George Constanza showdown, which would have been incredible. It would have been incredible because, in fact, Spock and Constanza were polar opposite second bananas. Seinfeld was the straight man to Constanza whereas Spock was the straight man to Kirk. And while Jerry and George viewed "The Wrath of Khan" as the pre-eminent "Star Trek" film (though Kramer was partial to "The Search For Spock"), I admit to having a place in my heart for the fourth film in the series.
We need to talk about "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home", of course, but before we do we need to talk about the opening passages of “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier” set in Yosemite National Park. The scene, if you don't recall, finds Kirk free climbing El Capitan and Spock flying in on some sort of foot-jet pack doohickey, allowing them to have a colorful give and take, right there on the side of a freaking mountain. "Twelve hundred points of interest in Yosemite and you pick me," says Kirk, and that cuts right to the heart of the matter. Wherever they were, whatever place, whether on futuristic Earth or out there in the far-flung reaches of the place called space, what really mattered was these two, their friendship, testy and loving, their emotional push and logical pull, and their banter. They were a comedy duo with semi-philosophical tendencies.
That mountainside verbal hoedown leads into the incredible scene around a campfire where Dr. McCoy says of a squabbling Kirk & Spock: "You know, you two could really drive a man to drink." Maybe it's because my first experience with "Star Trek" wasn't "First Generation", or even "The Motion Picture", but re-runs of the original series on our old black & white TV in the kitchen that often came across more like a sitcom than drama. And that leads me to "The Voyage Home", the greatest time travel movie ever made, the time travel movie that understood justifying the means of time travel was so much less vital than what the time travel wrought. And in "Star Trek IV", it wrought something less logical than Warner Bros. live action Looney Tunes.
In many ways "The Voyage Home" foreshadowed film's overriding and ridiculous importance on my absurd existence. It was Christmas Day 1986 and presents had been unwrapped and the meal had been consumed and all I wanted to do in my official capacity as College Football Fanatic was watch the Sun Bowl. My parents, however, decreed that our family would be going to the theater for a showing of "The Voyage Home." I rebelled, but I lost. I'm glad I lost. God, what a marvelous Christmas Day, and viewed through the prism of time I wonder if that's the moment when in spite of worshiping at the pagan altar of college football I sub-consciously realized the film de cinema was truly my bag, baby.
America's 1987 box office champion, "Three Men and a Baby", was directed by Nimoy, a delightful choreographing of comedy, but he outdid himself a year earlier with "The Voyage Home." In her original review for The New York Times Janet Maslin knocks around Mr. Nimoy's supervision of special effects and while her assessment is not invalid, well, in spite of "Star Trek's" space opera origins the effects are less the point than the comedy. Perhaps Nimoy struggles in the get-go, tying up loose ends from the previous movie and setting the table for the current one. Yet once the film goes back in time to then-present day San Francisco, he demonstrates a breezy professionalism. This isn't sci-fi, this is screwball.
It's a fish out of water comedy that finds the crew of the Enterprise going back to 1986, forcing these futuristic characters to try and fit themselves into a "primitive and paranoid" culture where they don't belong. The film's comic timing, never harried, is built with notably formal elegance to all manner of extremely polite payoffs. So many of it jokes are cornball, yes, but nevertheless effective, not so much middlebrow as totally accessible, an approach that in this day and age feels wistfully old-world.
Screwball comedies, however, of the golden era often had a socially conscious tinge to go with all that repartee, and "The Voyage Home" is no different. It packs a pro-environmenetal message into its narrative as the crew's quest involves rescuing a pair of humpback whales to bring them forward into the future, a place where they have gone extinct, quietly yet forcefully indicting mankind for its ecological idiocy. Yet simultaneously it takes an extra-terrerstrial - Nimoy's Spock - and makes him come to grips with his humaneness, and do so in a Reagan-era habitat not outwardly lending itself it to civility.
To my admittedly non-Federation approved eyes that was always the spiritual center of "Star Trek" - the yin & yang of emotion and logic, embodied in the kindly combative relationship of Kirk and Spock. And I will confess that in re-watching "The Voyage Home" the whole way through twenty-four afters after Mr. Nimoy's passing I found myself profoundly moved by a passage late in the film between Spock and his father.
It's no secret that Leonard Nimoy had a complicated relationship with the role that made him an icon, and how could he not? The part took him to a celebrity stratosphere that transcended most. Everyone mourned his passing, Trekkers, Trekkies, Federation of the Planet part-timers, neophytes, etc. And I think that's because the eternal inward battle of thinking with our heads and thinking with our hearts is one thing that will for certain exist in the twenty-third century the same as it existed in the twentieth. The key is to find the place that Spock found by the end of "The Voyage Home", which was the same place Nimoy found by the end of his long life.
Spock's father asks his son if he has a message for his mother. Spock replies matter-of-factly: "Tell her...I feel fine."
Time travel is inherently ridiculous. It is, after all, time travel. This is why I always find the generally overused film criticism term “plot holes” being associated with the term “time travel” to be almost as ridiculous as time travel itself. Oh, perhaps one day a sturdy, serious filmmaker will get down to brass tacks and create a time travel docudrama in which every single action, every single movement, every single breath is coordinated exactly to ensure prevention of the Butterfly Effect’s wrath (though, more than likely, this will drive audience members to naps in droves) but until that day time travel should merely exist as the dilithium that drives the plot.
Dilithium, of course, is the element that propels spaceships in “Star Trek” to travel at warp speed. At least, I think that’s what it is. At least, that’s what it was in “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home”, the only “Star Trek” movie Cinema Romantico really deems worthy of discussing. (I don't mean that as a knock against "Stat Trek", trekkies. Honest, I don't! It just ain't my bag, baby.) And hey! As chance would have it, “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” is all about……time travel!
In fact, “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” is the greatest movie ever made about time travel.
That’s right. You heard me.
Time travel is most effective and enjoyable when its explanation is limited. How? Don’t care. Why? All that matters. Establish the end game so that time travel is the only means to get us there and then, you know, just get us there. The end game in “Star Trek IV” is that humpback whales are needed to answer a probe threatening to destroy 23rd century humanity. Humpback whales have been extinct since the 20th century. Thus, the sole remedy is time travel. Now, how to time travel? What follows is what passes for the movie's entire explanation:
McCoy: “Are you really going to try time travel in this rust bucket?” Kirk: “We've done it before.” McCoy: “Sure, slingshot around the sun. If you pick up enough speed you're in time warp. If you don't, you fry.”
On with the show!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So yeah, they travel back in time, back to 1986, and proceed to do anything and everything that could overwhelmingly f--- up the future. Like, they’re not accidentally stepping a single innocent butterfly, yo, they’re basically taking battering rams to rhinos and driving them off cliffs. They need to ferry the whales to the future, of course, and Kirk’s requisite love interest COMES BACK TO THE FUTURE WITH HIM and in a minor mishap a naval officer winds up with Chekhov’s phaser and Spock Vulcan grips an 80’s-styled punk into submission and – gasp! – Kirk orders a Michelob (The Butterfly Effect should really be re-named The Michelob Effect) and, oh right, I almost forgot, Scotty gives away the secrets of futuristic transparent aluminum.
Well, he and McCoy need to barter with the kindly Dr. Nichols in order to attain the necessary equipment to house their whales aboard their spaceship for the spaceship ride home, see, and the only real bargaining chip he has is this futuristic formula. At this moment you can practically see/hear The Plot Hole Picker Outers blowing a gasket and The Butterfly Effect-ers crying heresy and, as if the movie senses it, McCoy pulls Scotty aside to strike it all down with one brilliant blow.
McCoy: “You realize that by giving him the formula we’re altering the future.” Scotty: “Why? How do we know he didn’t invent the thing?”
Scotty. Out.
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